And so endeth the world for forty whole minutes

On Monday night the world ended. For 40 minutes anyway.
Nicola Adam, Group EditorNicola Adam, Group Editor
Nicola Adam, Group Editor

Then it started again.

And when I say the world I mean Facebook.

Yes those well paid folks at FB HQ had to halt their games of pool and foot massages and leap up wearing their brightly coloured casual attire to sort out the complete collapse of the network which saw both Facebook and Instagram stop working worldwide.

In desperate scenes reminiscent of when Take That broke up the first time and when they stopped making Wispas, folks across our planet were desperately jabbing their useless phones, rebooting theirlaptops and throwing tablets at the wall.

Why?

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Because in some cases, they actually had to TALK to someone.

All was not lost though as Twitter - owned by different rich blokes probably in California - was still up and running which meant that for a glorious 2,400 seconds the social media world had to be summed up in 140 characters or less only - something appreciated greatly by journalists like myself.

Forced to precis complex issues in a sentence constantly, Twitter is manna to heaven for us and we suddenly had the social media world’s rapt attention for our pithy remarks.

Of course, the fact that the scenario is a very sad state of affairs goes without saying.

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But how, over a period of about 10 years, have methods of communication changed so rapidly that the removal of a mechanism which required us to hashtag things, boast about our number of friends and say LOL a lot - became the only way in which we can spend time talking to our friends and loved ones?

In so many ways it is fantastic, but it makes you realise how we have also gone backwards.

In many ways picking up a device and actually hearing someone else’s voice is so much more idealogically modern than a typed message.

And as for meeting someone in actual person - it’s like going to the cinema and seeing human people appear on the screen - but in see, hear and feel 4G.

It is amazing what we can do these days eh?

Or we could just Tweet.